Why The Crown has changed my views of the Queen and turned me away from wanting a republic

Australia’s debate over becoming a republic is still raging, but The Crown has done more to align me with the Royal Family than anything, Olivia Jenkins explains.

Opinion: The monarchy isn’t dead, yet.

Netflix’s The Crown has breathed new life into the Royal Family for Gen Z like me in a way that official royal visits or documentaries could not.

I was 13 years old when Kate Middleton made her way down the aisle in 2011, and I just couldn’t understand why the world seemed to have simply stopped for these people.

“What do they actually do if the United Kingdom has a Prime Minister? Why do we let them have all that money?”

But as the Queen marks her Platinum Jubilee, the show has reinvigorated her story for an audience for whom her reign has remained one of the unwavering pillars of social memory.

Her Majesty is the longest-serving monarch of our time.

Princess Diana was killed in 1997 – most Gen Zs weren’t born.

I was a year old when Australia voted to retain the monarchy in 1999.

Fast forward to 2022, after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s controversial relationship and departure from working royal duties, I’ve watched the show on a loop upward of four times.

Friends know how often I recommend the show when someone asks “what’s good to watch?” on Netflix at the moment.

Maybe it’s the decadent royal fashion. The sprawling estates and landscapes. A glimpse into a life that is so different from my own.

Or maybe, for increasingly disillusioned 20-somethings with arbitrary displays of exorbitant wealth at a time when their stagnant wages are more thinly stretched by essential living costs, The Crown’s depiction of the royals’ personal plights breaks down the prim and proper wall that once separated them from us.

An Ipsos poll of 1000 Australian 18-29 year olds revealed that if we held a vote today, we’d be more likely to support the monarchy than people in their 30s and 40s.

The show blurs the lines that distinguish history from artistic licence, perhaps to the criticism of Royalists and royal historians, challenging the historical portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II as the worldly embodiment of God. Unattainably rich. Untouchable.

In reality, we are no more familiar with actual conversations and emotions that have played out behind closed doors since the Queen was crowned at age 27 in 1953.

Director Peter Morgan’s creative licence in portrayals of the Queen’s interpersonal dynamics has been hotly contested since the show aired.

Olivia Colman plays Queen Elizabeth 11 in the Netflix drama (3rd season), The Crown.

But a subtly consistent juxtaposition between the infallibility of the monarchy as an institution and the mortal people whose duty it is to uphold it remained a constant dynamic throughout the four seasons to date.

The audience bears witness to Series 1 and 2 Queen actress Claire Foy’s face hardening with jealousy as a wave of realisation, then envy, washes over her when she discovers a photograph of renowned Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova buried in Prince Phillip’s luggage, suggesting an affair between the pair.

For the younger generation, this display of relatable human emotion lifted the Queen and her family off the flat surface of stamps and stale photographs and elevated them into one of the highest trending shows on Netflix during the pandemic through a crafted sense of authenticity and vulnerability.

Supplied Imelda Staunton as Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown season 5. Picture: Netflix

The Iron Curtain that has for so long been drawn across displays of human emotion by a working royal has been peeled back to reveal a woman who represents God on earth experiencing sentiments of jealousy, relationships, sex and insecurity.

In a scene that shows her bedridden in her royal chambers and deteriorating, Queen Mary says to a young Lilibet: “Monarchy is God’s sacred mission to grace and dignify the earth. To give ordinary people an ideal to strive towards, an example of nobility and duty to raise them in their wretched lives”.

I am yet to attain concrete answers for my questions, but what The Crown has at least cemented for me is a curiosity about the personal intricacies and emotional tribulations of the royals underneath the black line of chronological history.

While we may still be debating Australia’s place in the monarchy for years to come, The Crown has done more to align me with the Royal Family and its undeniably influential history than any official biography or documentary ever has.